December 23, 2010

What Must My Friend Scaife Think?

The hard-right Heritage Foundation, one of the pillars of the conservative movement, made defeating START one of its top institutional priorities. Yet 13 Republican Senators ended up bucking Heritage and voted to ratify the START treaty. Heritage ended up so far to the right that it was unable to convince any significant number of Republicans to follow its nonsensical substantive attack on START that the treaty would lead to massive nuclear proliferation and eventually to a nuclear war.

Yet despite all this effort, a quarter of the Republican caucus bucked Heritage’s advocacy campaign and its lobbying efforts to support the treaty. As the facts came out and it became increasingly clear that none of their anti-treaty arguments held any water, Republicans increasingly relied on process complaints to oppose the treaty, rather than substance. In the end, few Senators, with the exception of Jim DeMint, really embraced the Heritage line. The pressure they exerted on Republican members was in the end outdone by the coalition of progressive groups that pressed to ratify the treaty.

Let's not forget the closely intertwined political and financial relationship between Heritage and the Tribune-Review's owner, Richard Mellon Scaife.

If the Democrat Senate majority leader gets his way today, the upper chamber will vote to end debate on the abomination known as New START -- a successor nuclear arms treaty with Russia -- and then, likely on Thursday, vote to saddle the United States with a hand-tying, national-security-threatening "deal."

It's this simple, as stated by Reagan administration Defense official Richard Perle and Heritage Foundation defense scholar Kim Holmes: "(A)rms-control treaties should serve our security interests now and in the longer term. New START does neither."

Perle contended before the invasion that the US could topple Saddam without a sizable military effort. On PBS, he said, "I would be surprised if we need anything like the 200,000 [troops] figure that is sometimes discussed in the press. A much smaller force, principally special operations forces, but backed up by some regular units, should be sufficient." And in May 2002, he told me, "The Army guys don't know anything" about the number of troops necessary for success in Iraq. Perle said that only 40,000 soldiers would be required. After the war, it was clear that the 200,000 or so troops deployed by the Bush-Cheney administration was not a large enough force for the mission.

David Corn in the above piece also reminds us that despite what Perle asserted, Iraq was not "on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons."

So he's not much of an expert on nuclear arms (obviously) so tell me again why he's so nobly quoted by the Trib?